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精彩极了和糟糕透了
作者：巴德·舒尔伯格
记得七八岁的时候，我写了第一首诗。母亲一念完那首诗，眼睛亮亮地，兴奋地嚷着：“巴迪，这真是你写的吗？多美的诗啊！精彩极了！”她搂住了我，赞扬雨点般地落到我身上。我既腼腆又得意洋洋，点头告诉她这首诗确实是我写的。她高兴得再次拥抱了我。
整个下午，我用最漂亮的花体字把诗认认真真地重新誉写了一遍，还用彩色笔在它的周围描上了一圈花边。将近七点钟的时候，我悄悄走进饭厅，满怀信心地把它平平整整地放在餐桌上。
七点。七点一刻。七点半。父亲还没有回来。我简直急不可耐了。他是一家影片公司的重要人物，写过好多剧本。快到八点钟时，父亲终于推门而入。他进了饭厅，目光被餐桌上的那首诗吸引住了。我紧张极了。
“这是什么？”他伸手拿起我的诗。
“亲爱的，发生了件奇妙的事。巴迪写了一首诗，精彩极了……”母亲上前说道。
“对不起，我自己会判断的。”父亲开始读诗。
我把头埋得低低的。诗只有十行，可我觉得他读了几个小时.
“我看这诗糟糕透了。”父亲把诗扔回原处。
我的眼睛湿润了，头也沉重得抬不起来。
“亲爱的，我真不懂你这是什么意思！”母亲嚷着，“这不是在你的公司里。巴迪还是个孩子，这是他写的第一首诗，他需要鼓励。”
“我不明白了，”父亲并不退让，“难道这世界上糟糕的诗还不够多么？”
我再也受不了了。我冲出饭厅，跑进自己的房间，扑到床上失望地痛哭起来。饭厅里,
父母亲还在为那首诗争吵着。几年后，当我再拿起那首诗，不得不承认父亲是对的。那的确是一首相当糟糕的诗。不过母亲还是一如既往地鼓励我。因此我还一直在写作着。有一次我鼓起勇气给父亲看了一篇我新写的短篇小说。“写得不怎么样，但还不是毫无希望。”根据父亲的批语，我学着进行修改，那时我还未满十二岁。
现在，我已经有了很多作品，出版、发行了一部部小说、戏剧和电影剧本。我越来越体会到我当初是多么幸运。我有个慈祥的母亲，她常常对我说：“巴迪，这是你写的吗？精彩极了。”我还有个严厉的父亲，他总是皱着眉头说：“我想这个糟糕透了。”
这些年来，我少年时代听到的这两种声音一直交织在我的耳际：“精彩极了”，“糟糕透了”，“精彩极了”，“糟糕透了”……它们像两股风不断地向我吹来。我谨慎地把握住我生活的小船，使它不被任何一股刮倒。
The Wonderful Lousy PoemsBudd Schulberg
When I was eight or nine years old, I wrote my first poem.
At that time my father was a Hollywood tycoon, head of Paramount Studios. My mother was a founder and prime mover in various intellectual projects, helping to bring "culture" to the exuberant Hollywood community, of the 1920s.
My mother read the little poem and began to cry. "Buddy, you didn't really write this beautiful, beautiful poem!" Shyly, proud-bursting, I stammered that I had. My mother poured out her welcome praise. Why, this poem was nothing short of genius. She had no idea that I had such talent for writing. I must write more poems, keep on writing, perhaps someday even publish them.
I glowed. "What time will Father be home?" I asked. I could hardly wait to show him what I had accomplished. My mother said she hoped he would be home around 7. I spent the best part of that afternoon preparing for his arrival.
First, I wrote the poem out in my finest flourish. Then I used colored crayons to draw an elaborate border around it that would do justice to its brilliant content. Then I waited. As 7 o'clock drew near, I confidently placed it right on my father's plate on the dining-room table.
But my father did not return at 7. I rearranged the poem so it would appear at a slightly more advantageous angle on his plate. Seven-fifteen. Seven-thirty. The suspense was exquisite. I admired my father. He had begun his motion-picture career as a writer. He would be able to appreciate this wonderful poem of mine even more than my mother.
This evening it was almost 8 o'clock when my father burst in, and his mood seemed thunderous. He was an hour late for dinner, but he could not sit down. He circled the long dining-room table with a Scotch highball in his hand, calling down terrible oaths on his glamorous employees. I can see him now, a big Havana cigar in one hand, the rapidly disappearing highball in the other, crying out against the sad fates that had sentenced him to the cruel job of running a teeming Hollywood studio.
"Imagine, we would have finished the picture tonight," my father was shouting. "Instead that blank blank MORON, that blank blank BLANK suddenly gets it into her beautiful but empty little head that she can't play the last scene. So the whole company has to stand there at $1,000 a minute while this silly little BLANK walks off the set! Now I have to go down to her beach house tonight and beg her to come back on Monday."
My father always paced determinedly as he ranted against the studio greats, and now as he wheeled he paused and glared at his plate. There was a suspenseful silence. He was reaching for my poem. I lowered my head and stared down into my plate. I was full of anxious daydreams. How wonderful it would be if this very first work of mine drove away the angry clouds that now darkened my important father's face!
"What is this?" I heard him say.
"Ben, Buddy has been waiting for you for hours," my mother said. "A wonderful thing has happened. Buddy has written his first poem. And it's beautiful, absolutely amaz-"
"If you don't mind, I'd like to decide that for myself," Father said.
Now was the moment of decision. I kept my face lowered to my plate. It could not have taken very long to read that poem. It was only 10 lines long. But it seemed to take hours. I remember wondering why it was taking so long. I could hear him dropping the poem back on the table again. I could not bear to look up for the verdict. But in a moment I was to hear it.
"I think it's lousy," my father said.
I couldn't look up. I was ashamed of my eyes getting wet.
"Ben, sometimes I don't understand you," my mother was saying. "This is just a little boy. You're not in your studio now. These are the first lines of poetry he's ever written. He needs encouragement."
"I don't know why," my father held his ground. "Isn't there enough lousy poetry in the world already? I don't know any law that says Buddy has to become a poet."
I forget what my mother said. I wasn't hearing so well because it is hard to hear clearly when your head is making its own sounds of crying. On my left, she was saying soothing things to me and critical things of my father. But I clearly remember his self-defense: "Look, I pay my best writers $2,000 a week. All afternoon I've been tearing apart their stuff. I only pay Buddy 50 cents a week. And you're trying to tell me I don't have a right to tear apart his stuff if I think it's lousy!"
That expressive vernacular adjective hit me over the heart like a hard fist. I couldn't stand it another second. I ran from the dining room bawling. I staggered up to my room and threw myself on the bed and sobbed. When I had cried the worst of the disappointment out of me, I could hear my parents still quarreling over my first poem at the dinner table.
That may have been the end of the anecdote — but not of its significance for me.
A few years later I took a second look at that first poem, and reluctantly I had to agree with my father's harsh judgment. It was a pretty lousy poem. After a while, I worked up the courage to show him something new, a primitive short story written in what I fancied to be the dark Russian manner. My father thought it was overwritten but not hopeless. I was learning to rewrite. And my mother was learning that she could criticize me without crushing me. You might say we were all learning. I was going on 12.
But it wasn't until I was at work on my first novel, a dozen years later, that the true meaning of that painful "first poem" experience dawned on me. I had written a first chapter, but I didn't think it was good enough. I wanted to do it over. My editor, a wise hand who had counseled O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner, told me not to worry, to keep on going, the first chapter was fine. Keep writing, just let it flow, it's wonderful, he encouraged me. Only when it was all finished and I was in a triumphant glow of achievement did he take me down a peg. "That chapter may be a little weak at that. If I were you, I'd look at it again." Now, on the crest of having written a novel, I could absorb a sharp critical blow.
As I worked my way into other books and plays and films, it became clearer and clearer to me how fortunate I had been to have had a mother who said, "Buddy, did you really write this — I think it's wonderful!" and a father who shook his head no and drove me to tears with his, "I think it's lousy." A writer, in fact all of us in life, needs that mother force, the loving force from which all creation flows; and yet the mother force alone is incomplete, even misleading, finally destructive, without the father force to caution, "Watch. Listen. Review. Improves."
Those conflicting but complementary voices of my childhood echo down through the years — wonderful, lousy, wonderful, lousy — like two powerful, opposing winds buffeting me. I try to navigate my little craft so as not to capsize before either. Between the two poles of affirmation and doubt, both in the name of love, I try to follow my true course
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